Social Media

A Closer Look at fbFund Winners

Yesterday, Facebook announced the 25 winners of the fbFund. The winners were selected out of a pool of 600 applicants and will each receive $25,000 to further develop their ideas. Each of the apps will also have the chance to compete for five $250,000 prices, which will be awarded in December.

Today we're taking a closer look at 10 of the 25 apps. The collection offers a wide variety of applications that run the gamut of useful productivity solutions to just silly fun activities, all with a social twist. Most of these application are active, though some are not yet, but we have included them because of their innovative concepts.

Party Buzz - This app aggregates the activities of all your friends into one place so everyone can see what's going on in their circle at a glance. All upcoming events are also displayed along with the number of friends attending. This method is appealing because it saves a lot of time compared to normal ways we try to plan group activities.

The Web needs to focus more on saving us more time and making things easier, which this app does when it comes to getting a group of people to agree on an activity. The other helpful part of the app is the fact that it can also just give you new ideas about what to do that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. These little value adds to an app or service give it bonus points and makes us want to go back for more.

Check My Campus - This application allows current college students to share photos and videos about life on their campuses, giving high schoolers an inside look at what real life is like at these schools. The value in this is that you're not getting some pre-packaged marketing campaign for a university with actors pretending to be students. Instead, you're getting real thoughts and opinions from actual students, sometimes even less than flattering honest feedback about a particular school, which is refreshing.

Pongr - Using the mobile aspect of this app you can check for the best prices online while you are out in real stores. You can share and send photos of any item you want to buy and verify whether or not you're getting a good deal. Now that we are connected to the net wherever we go, we need more apps and services like this that take advantage of that immediacy and all the available information at our disposal.

We also love the fact that this app can actually save you some serious money. How many times have you been burned by impulse buys only to find out later online that you could've gotten the same exact thing for half the cost? Pongr aims to reduce that pain by allowing you to check before you buy anything. We think that's nice.

BarTab - The last thing we want to do is promote and encourage drinking, so this was a tough one. Still, we recommend this app because of the convenience and coolness of being able to buy someone a drink or receive one for free through Facebook. The only downside is that you have to go to one of their participating establishments. Still, if you are near a bar that honors BarTab gifts, then it could be a lot of fun. It could lead to real life meetups and good times, and anything that promotes inter-personal activities (yes, even drinking, responsibly of course) is a good thing in our book.

GroupCard - Being able to get all your friends to sign a card becomes a lot easier with this app. It automatically tracks all of your friends' birthdays and you can print the final results once everyone has signed it.

We like this one because it's another app that does a good job making groups of people accomplish a common objective (like PartyBuzz does for attending events), in this case it's presenting a card with everyone's message. We all know what a pain that is to do at work or school, running around trying to make sure everyone gets a chance to sign a group card. It not only saves time but ensures no one is missed, and it's always a shame when that happens.

Newsbrane - This app is like a mini-digg site for all your friends where you can share the best news stories and other sites. The thing that we like most is the way that it learns what to recommend by analyzing how you vote on news stories. That's not bad for a tiny little app. We might be biased a tad because we are positive that many of these news stories will be from Mashable.

Koofers - We like the way this app lets students help one another with classes, tests, assignments and more. Its ebay ratings of classes and professors are useful and sometimes a hoot too. Think Yelp for school, instead of restaurants. It's always a good sign when you see an app or service and wish it had been around when you were in school. That kind of feeling means the service is providing some real value.

Being prepared with knowledge and information always makes you feel more confident and thus more productive. Being able to learn what others think of an experience that you're about to have is very useful and could only help you enrich your own experience. Also, we like the fact that you can also learn what NOT to do when it comes to certain professors, classes, courses, etc. It's a good thing if you can avoid stepping on rakes that others have before you.

RealGifts - Facebook members enjoy giving each other those virtual gifts, but this app helps with the real deal. Select real merchandise and have it shipped to your friends. Best of all, you don't even need to know anyone's real addresses either.

The old adage is so true, nothing beats the real thing! There's only so much you can do with all those virtual teddy bears or flowers. We think it's clever to merge the fun aspects of sending gifts to friends with real world merchandise.

Socialfly - being able to write reviews of people is an interesting concept. Other features like reminders to contact friends and make plans are handy, especially when it's available on the iPhone as an app. Let's face it, it's one thing to read someone's profile page which they've written themselves versus a collection of honest thoughts and opinions from a wide variety of people that know this person.

Obviously, the more people that contribute to this process, the better, more accurate and valuable the evaluation becomes. We like that we ourselves can learn a thing or two from the feedback of others. Sure, it stings sometimes to get criticized, but that's how we learn and grow. That's pretty good stuff to get from an app.

Faithfeed - We like this app not because we're that spiritual, but because it reminds us of Twitter, but with a religious flavor. It's a good way to find friends of similar faith and perhaps learn about others as well.

We like that this app gives users (especially young people trying to find their way in life) a forum to express themselves in a way that they normally can't on other more generic public networks. It provides a safe haven, if you will, to share how you are really feeling. If nothing else, it could be a cathartic experience.

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Mashable
is a leading source for news, information and resources for the Connected Generation. Mashable reports on the importance of digital innovation and how it empowers and inspires people around the world. Mashable's record 42 million unique visitors worldwide and 21 million social media followers are one of the most influential and engaged online communities. Founded in 2005, Mashable is headquartered in New York City with an office in San Francisco.